Host Per Fagereng speaks with economist and author Joel Magnuson about his new book, "The Approaching Great Transformation: Toward a Livable Post Carbon Economy", which is about how we think and act in the world economically as the era of cheap oil comes to an end. Your calls to 503 231-8187 are welcome.

Don Merrill speaks with Arun Gandhi, the fifth grandson of India’s legendary leader, Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi. Growing up under the discriminatory apartheid laws of South Africa, he was beaten by “white” South Africans for being too black and “black” South Africans for being too white; so, Arun sought eye-for-an-eye justice. However, he learned from his parents and grandparents that justice does not mean revenge, it means transforming the opponent through love and suffering. Arun is the author of several books. The first, "A Patch of White" (1949), is about life in prejudiced South Africa; then, he wrote two books on poverty and politics in India; followed by a compilation of M.K. Gandhi's Wit & Wisdom.

"The Really Big Transition: Saying Goodbye To The Enlightenment, Saying Hello To Consciousness"

We hear an excerpt from the program Radio Ecoshock called "The Really Big Transition: Saying Goodbye To The Enlightenment, Saying Hello To Consciousness". Host Alex Smith speaks with author Dr. Carolyn Baker who has been a psychotherapist in private practice, and is a former adjunct professor of history and psychology. Carolyn now lives in Colorado, and is active with the Transition movement there.

The guest is Buck Parker, Strategic Advisor at Earthjustice, a non-profit public interest law organization dedicated to protecting the magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth, and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment. He'll talk about his work with Earthjustice through the courts and on Capitol Hill. Buck Parker speaks on "Who Owns Our Environment?" on Wednesday, February 27th, at 7PM as part of the Illahee Lecture Series at the First Congregational Church at 1123 SW Park Ave in downtown Portland.

Journalist Reese Erlich speaks on "The Middle East and the Arab Spring: Ten Years After the Invasion of Iraq." Veteran journalist and author Reese Erlich spoke in Portland on February 16th. Reese Erlich has been a journalist for 44 years. His books include "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You" and "The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of US Policy and the Middle East Crisis".

"Who Bombed Judi Bari?" Join host Paul Roland as he interviews Darryl Cherney about his recently-released documentary on the 1990 car-bombing of Earth First! activists Bari and Cherney. The KBOO-sponsored Portland premiere will be the same evening at Clinton Street Theater (showtimes 7 and 9:15 p.m.).

For those too young to know about it, Bari and Cherney were in the middle of organizing a major campaign ("Redwood Summer") to stop the destruction of redwood forests in northern California when a bomb blew up underneath Judi Bari's seat in the car as they were leaving Oakland to go to an organizing concert in Santa Cruz, California.. She was almost killed and suffered debilitating injuries. Cherney, in the passenger seat, escaped with less serious injuries.

Gupta reports on the various proposals to safeguard New York City from future superstorms like Hurricane Sandy. In the wake of the storm, New York is now planning massive barriers and seawalls around the city, which could cost another $25 billion to construct. And yet, Gupta reports, planners freely admit that they have not taken into account the needs of low-income residents, thousands of whom would likely be displaced.

After decades of inaction, we are now rapidly losing the window in which we can act to prevent catastrophic climate change. Yet with all the continued global fossil fuel development underway, it would appear that the involved governments and private companies couldn't care less. How about you?

Greenpeace has recently compiled a report detailing 14 of the world's biggest coal, methane, and oil projects and how their development would seem to doom any chance of preventing a climate catastrophe.

Audio

The growing movement to limit the "rights" of corporations and rein in their destructive practices at the local level through ordinances and ballot initiatives is explored with Thomas Linzey of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund and Paul Cienfuegos of Community Rights PDX. Hosted by Paul Roland.

The growing movement to limit the "rights" of corporations and rein in their destructive practices at the local level through ordinances and ballot initiatives is explored with Thomas Linzey of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund and Paul Cienfuegos of Community Rights PDX. Hosted by Paul Roland.

Paul Roland and Mic Crenshaw talk with Jared Ball from Baltimore, Md. and Rosa Clemente from Amherst, Massachusetts. The program offers a critical perspective on the commemorations of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream Speech." Dr. Ball said recently, "neither King's false heirs nor the presidency of false hopes would exist at all without first the assassination of King and then the perennial abuse of his history and image. These replacement events and leaders are fraudulaent stand-ins for a movement so well represented by King's focused stances against the intransigence of white supremacy, the vilence of capitalism at home and the imperialism it fosters abroad." Join us for a lively conversation!

Mic Crenshaw is a Portland hip-hop artist and community activist. He is involved with Housing Is For Everyone, a local housing rights movement organization. For information on his recordings, videos, biography and contact information, go to miccrenshow.com. Housing Is For Everyone can be reached at 971-266-4311 orhousingisforeveryone@gmail.com. their website, housingisforeveryone.org, will be up and running in September.

Dr. Jared Ball teaches communication at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD, hosts a program on WPFW, part of the Pacifica radio network in Washington, D.C. and is the author of "I Mix What I Like: A Mixtape Manifesto." He also co-edited "A Lie of Invention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X."

Rosa Clemente is a community organizer, independent journalist and hip-hop activist. She was the vice-presidential running mate of Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney in the 2008 elections. She's also the founder of Know Thy Self Productions. Currently, she's a doctoral student in the WEB DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass-Amherst.

More perspectives on the March on Washington commemorations and Dr. King's legacy can be found at blackagendareport.com. Glen Ford, the Esecutive Editor of Black Agenda Report, was also invited to be on the show, but was unable to appear. He wrote an article for the Report called "The Black Mis-Leaders Love-Fest with Power on the Mall."

Ahjamu Baraka was also invited, but was travelling back to Colombia, where he lives. His article, "Obama Should Not Be Welcomed at the March on Washington Commemoration" appeared on www.counterpunch.org August 19. He also wrote "The Assassination of Martin Luther King and the Peace Movement" for Counterpunch on April 4.

This program highlights the upcoming KBOO co-sponsored event with an interview of Pete Stauffer, Ocean Programs manager for Surfrider Foundation by Ross Freeman Levin.

On thursday, July 25th the Portland Chapter of Surfrider Foundation is hosting the Oregon Summer Soiree at the Holocene (1001 SE Morrison) in Portland from 6pm to 1am. The fundraiser will include an Art Show, Silent Auction, Heart and the Sea film screening, raffle, music by the Renegade Stringband, and much more! Proceeds will benefit the Portland Chapter of Surfrider’s ‘Clean Water Campaign’.

Old Mole Joe Clement, and Kathryn Sackinger talk with sociology grad-student and Jacobin Magzine editor Peter Frase, about the idea of an unconditional and universal basic income. Because basic income often stirs strong feelings about people deserving their livelihood, they also spend a lot of time talking about prejudices against those who don't work in a conventional job and problems in the distribution of what counts as work. They consider what full employment really means and how it harms people when one-sided jobs rhetoric dominates economic justice conversations.

Below are links to articles and organizations mentioned during the show. If you would like to hear more on KBOO about basic income and the politics of work, please don't hesitate to email Joe.

The music and stories you hear at the beginning in the middle and at the end of the show are Utah Phillips singing "Hallelujah I'm a Bum".

Andrew Geller speaks with Dr. Ted Schuur, an Associate Professor in the University of Florida's Biology Department and Principal Investigator of the Permafrost Carbon Network, discuss permafrost and what's happening to it in a rapidly warming Arctic.

Host Jay Thiemeyer speaks with David McNally about his book Global Slump, which analyzes the global financial meltdown as the first systemic crisis of the neoliberal stage of capitalism. McNally argues that – far from having ended – the crisis has ushered in a whole period of worldwide economic and political turbulence. In developing an account of the crisis as rooted in fundamental features of capitalism, Global Slump challenges the view that its source lies in financial deregulation.

McNally locates the recent meltdown in the intense economic restructuring that marked the recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. Through this lens, he highlights the emergence of new patterns of world inequality and new centers of accumulation, particularly in East Asia, and the profound economic instabilities these produced. In Global Slump McNally offers an original account of the “financialization” of the world economy during this period, and explores the intricate connections between international financial markets and new forms of debt and dispossession, particularly in the Global South.

David McNally is professor of political science at York University, Toronto. He is the author of five previous books: Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism (1988); Against the Market: Political Economy Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique (2003); Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor and Liberation (2001); Another World is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism (2002; second revised edition 2006); and Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism (2011). His articles have appeared in many journals, including Historical Materialism, Capital and Class, New Politics, and Review of Radical Political Economics. David McNally is also a long-time activist in socialist, anti-poverty and migrant justice movements.

Host Marianne Barisonek speaks with Greg Muttitt, author of Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq.

The departure of the last U.S. troops from Iraq at the end of 2011 left a broken country and a host of unanswered questions. What was the war really about? Why and how did the occupation drag on for nearly nine years? And why did the troops have to leave? Now, in a gripping account of the war that dominated the last decade, investigative journalist Greg Muttitt takes us behind the scenes to answer these questions and tells the untold story of the oil politics that played out through the occupation.

Greg Muttitt was previously co-director of campaigning charity Platform, which exposes and fights the environmental and human impacts of the oil industry.

Since the Iraq war started in 2003, Greg has investigated the hidden plans for the future of the country's oil. This work took him to meetings where the US and UK government officials lobbied Iraqi decision-makers, and to meetings where Iraqi oil ministry teams discussed their future oil policy with western companies. He met some of the oil executives who hoped to benefit from transforming Iraq’s oil industry, and the government officials and advisers they worked with. Greg also got hold of hundreds of unreleased British and American government documents, which described their plans and actions to reshape Iraq’s oil industry.

But Greg also talked to ordinary Iraqis, and a few politicians, about what they wanted to happen to their oil. He attended Iraq’s first anti-privatisation conference in Basra, and the meeting in Amman at which Iraq’s trade unions decided they would fight the oil law the US was pushing. He made many Iraqi friends, and came to know some of Iraq’s foremost oil experts. These experiences gave him a very different perspective from what we read in the papers.

Host Michelle Schroeder Fletcher speaks with professor and author George Lakeoff about his new book, co-authored with Elisabeth Wehling, called THE LITTLE BLUE BOOK: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic. Lakeoff says the Democrats have too often failed to use language linking their moral values with their policies. He offers Democrats and progressives language to communicate their moral values clearly and forcefully, with hands-on advice for discussing the most pressing issues of our time. He also deconstructs the ways that extreme conservative positions have permeated political discourse.

George Lakeoff is Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Don’t Think of an Elephant!, among other works, and is America’s leading expert on the framing of political ideas. Elisabeth Wehling is a political strategist and author working in the U.S. and Europe. She is doing research in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, on how politics is understood both in American and Europe.

Comments

Please ask Mr. Naito if his love of democracy extends to his business. Would he be willing to turn his development firm into a employee run cooperative corporation, giving ownership and organizational rights to employees. Mr. Naito's concern for democracy probably ends at doors to his corporation. Mr. Naito looks at this battle to develop the Hood River riverfront property as a public realtions battle. He will promise the community jobs and the city council financial support, and the council will eye the property tax revenue as a benefit to the community. If he is successful, once again we will be selling our responsibility to the land and the river for a short term gain. Mr. Naito cares little for the community, but operates on greed. If the environmental laws and regulations were not in place he would not be concerned at all with the impact of his development on the river, the wild life, and the ability of people to enjoy what nature have given us for free.

Bravo for having this debate, though. And controlling the civility of the debate.